Cyborg Beetles Sport Nerve-Gas Sensors

All-carbon devices made from nanotubes and graphene can be attached to a wide variety of surfaces, including plants, insects, paper, clothes, and human skin.

UNIST/American Chemical Society

Gallery

11InsaneInventionsYouDidn'tKnowExisted

View Caption+

Science fiction books, novels and television have, for years, invented technology for the purposes of plot. But fact is almost always stranger than fiction. Many of the devices you might recognize from your favorite sci-fi stories are already a reality. Take a look.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#2: Driverless cars can only lead to cabbie-less cabs.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#3: This one needs a track.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#4: Assists soldiers as well as the elderly.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+

Although technically not nano-sized, these micro air vehicles get around unseen.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#6: If only there were aliens to communicate with.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#7: For those who don't understand what tail-wagging means.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#8: It's only a matter of time.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#9: Who wants to test this one?

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+#10: The strongest metal in sci-fi could be real.

Wish.co.uk

View Caption+

Today's force fields are less of a shield and more of a protective blast.

Graphene is the most promising new material out there, likely to revolutionize the way we do or build almost anything. It's pure carbon, and totally amazing. Trace shows us all the different ways this material could change life on Earth.

The design of the device takes advantage of carbon nanotubes semiconducting properties so that they serve as the transistors or the sensors, while the pure conductor properties of graphene allows it to serve as the material for the interconnects.

"The channel part requires semiconducting materials whose resistance can be sensitively controlled by external bias,” explained Jang-Ung Park, Assistant Professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), in an interview for Phys.org. “The electrode part needs metallic materials whose resistance is very small with the negligible change by external bias."

The Korean researchers, representing both the UNIST and the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute, have demonstrated that the fully integrated, all-carbon devices can be attached to a wide variety of surfaces including plants, insects, paper, clothes and human skin. The flexible electronic sensors remain attached to the surfaces by exploiting van der Waal forces, which represent all the attractive or repulsive forces between molecules that are not covalent bonds.

The researchers took the unusual step of applying the flexible sensors to plants and insects to see if the devices could be used to detect very low levels of DMMP vapor (1 ppm), which is used for producing nerve agents such as soma and sarin. Park told Nanoclast that his team's devices performed comparably to current state-of-the-art sensors and showed that the sensors could be used to monitor a variety of environmental conditions, including temperature, humidity, pollution and infections. The devices do not need a battery because the researchers have integrated an antenna onto the devices that can be used to receive power.

"We integrated antennas with our devices," Park said. "Thus, the wireless transportation of power and sensing signals was possible with no battery."

While the researchers initially have just demonstrated that the all-carbon flexible sensors can be used as environmental sensors, they intend to look at how the technology can be adapted for implantable and wearable devices.

"In this paper, we just demonstrated the detection of the nerve gas using the biocompatible devices," Park said. "As our future research, we will develop various sensing systems, including diabetes, pollutions and radioactivity, using the wearable electronic devices."